[RELEASED] SmoothTrails trail rendering system

Hey game developers!

I'm super excited to raise awareness for my brand new asset on its way to the Asset Store very soon now!! It's called SmoothTrails, and it does what it says. It's a better version of the built-in Unity TrailRenderer. You might ask, why not just use TrailRenderer or one of the several other trail generators?

Here's why you might like SmoothTrails:

1. You have TrailRenderers already, but the trails look bad when objects rotate too fast, or frame rate drops.
2. You have someone else's trails package but they render slowly.
3. You want more control over the quality-vs-performance, perhaps dynamically.
4. You want to customize TrailRenderer, but don't have source code.

Features:

• SmoothTrails comes with full source code.
• SmoothTrails is a custom reimplementation of the Unity TrailRenderer component, and relies on LineRenderer, so the setup is what you're already comfortable with.
• You can tell SmoothTrails how many cubic Bezier spline points to add between segment samples, and it does so smoooooothly. (It's a harder problem to solve than you might expect.)
• SmoothTrails has 3 levels of quality that adjust performance/quality tradeoff.

Here's a sample of what a TrailRenderer and SmoothTrails object look like side-by-side... I accidentally recorded this one in LOW QUALITY. At high quality, it's perfectly curved. I'll re-record when I get a chance.

I can't wait to hear your feedback and see how I can help make your games better!

Best regards,
JH

 

Good morning devs!

I just pushed v1.1 of SmoothTrails today! Primarily this is just a cleanup release, but I added a nice PDF for documentation to explain a little how to test it out, and how to integrate it into your projects. There's some better explanation of what the knobs and dials do, as well as a few details on getting support and about us. In the rush to get SmoothTrails to the finish line several months ago, we didn't really take that as far as we wanted to... so now we did!

If there's any features or improvements you'd like to see with this asset, drop us a line. We're happy to chat about it.

Thanks!

 

Does this support texture mapped trails?
I like to use it for tire tracks if thats possible?

 

It should work fine. If you can get a trailrenderer or linerenderer to use the material and look good, smooth trails will too, because it uses a linerenderer as the underlying rendering mechanism. It just rearranges the points to be smoother.

Hope that helps!

 

just one more question, does it drag the tiled texture or can it stay in place?

Unity trail render does drag the tiled texture so I cannot use that for tire tracks, I hope I can use this asset for that

 

https://forum.unity.com/threads/trail-that-doesnt-drag-the-texture-with-it.435094/

Here is the drag issue I mentioned discussed

 

Ah, yes it will probably drag the texture unless you were to use a triplanar shader that uses world space coordinates to lay down treads.